Jace Hunter was a lot of things.Difficult. Cold. Impossible.
But he wasn’tdangerous. Not tome. The most dangerous thing about Jace was how safe he made me feel, and that terrified me more than anything Tobias ever did.
Miles sent the address.
I was pulling on my jacket when I looked out the window. The sky over Miami had turned the color of bruised metal, clouds piling up from the west, heavy and low enough to swallow the tops of the buildings downtown. It was going to rain hard and soon.
Miley appeared in the hallway. I asked, "Can I borrow your car?"
"You’re driving into a storm."
"I’ll be there before it starts. And I don’t mind getting a little wet."
She studied me for a long moment. Then she walked to the closet, pulled out an umbrella, and handed it to me.
"Be safe. Text me when you get there. And Anna?"
"Yeah?"
"Don’t come back until you’ve figured out what you actually want. Because the sighing is killing me."
I took the umbrella and walked out the door.
The first drops hit the windshield before I reached the highway.
The drive was long. Miami fell away behind me, the skyline shrinking in my rearview mirror, the highway stretching out ahead. The rain came down in sheets, heavy and relentless, turning the road into a gray blur. The wipers worked overtime and my headlights carved tunnels through the dark. The heaterwas on but I was still cold. My fingers were stiff on the wheel and the windshield kept fogging at the edges. But I kept driving.
The highway narrowed to two lanes. Then to mountain roads that wound through trees so thick the canopy would’ve blocked the sky if it hadn’t already disappeared behind the rain. The GPS lost signal twice. I pulled over once to check the directions Miles had texted me—landmarks and turns, because cell service this far out was a suggestion, not a guarantee.
I almost turned back three times. At the gas station where the attendant looked at me like I was crazy for driving into the mountains in this weather. At the fork in the road where both options looked equally likely to lead nowhere. At the final stretch—a dirt road turned to mud by the rain.
The cabin appeared through the trees like something from another world. Larger than I expected. Modern, wood and glass, perched on a ridge with a valley dropping away behind it. A blacked-out SUV sat in the driveway.
He was here.
I parked. Cut the engine. Sat there for a minute with the rain hammering the roof and my heart hammering my ribs and the full weight of what I was about to do pressing down on me.
I got out of the car. The rain hit me immediately, cold and hard, soaking through my jacket in seconds. I grabbed the umbrella Miley gave me, fought it open against the wind, and walked to the porch. My hands were shaking and it wasn’t from the cold.
I knocked.
Footsteps inside. A pause. Then the door opened.
CHAPTER 16
Anna
"You shouldn’t be here."
He said it before I’d even lowered my hand. Jace Hunter was standing in the doorway in a dark sweater and bare feet, no glasses on, and after a week of empty offices and locked doors and silence, the sight hit me somewhere I wasn’t braced for.
His hair was longer than I’d seen it, curling past his ears, and there were shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Without the glasses his eyes were different. Exposed. Gray and sharp and looking at me like I was a problem he’d specifically retreated to the mountains to avoid and here I was, dripping on his porch.
"The paparazzi." He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, blocking the entrance with his body. "If they find out you came here, it gets worse. For both of us. What are you doing here?"
"Are you hiding from the press or from me?" I asked straight to the point.
